Monday 13 November 2017

Weekly Update: November 5 to 11

(First off, apologies to all of those who were looking for this on Monday.  I hadn't realized it hadn't gone up since I put the wrong date on the scheduled post.)

Weekly word count: (checking NaNoWriMo site): 9 313

Whew!  That's way better than I've been doing.  So a few things are clearly working for me:

1) Staying up late to write rather than trying to do it in the afternoon and early evening while I am also trying to keep an eye on the kids.

2) Using the weekend for writing blitzes instead of blogging or tweet-boarding or other writing business.

3) Getting to enter a daily word count and watching the overall progress on a graphic.

The staying up late has been a problematic success.  I'm getting less sleep, which is taking a toll on both my alertness and productivity, but on those days when I've skipped writing, I find I still have a hard time falling asleep and I feel frustrated and irritable.  So there's no real win either way.  Ideally, I'd like to have my early afternoons available for writing again (or heck, the whole day while the kids are at school) but that's not a reality right now and I'm not going to put myself on hold until it is.

I've started using the post-school to kids' bedtime hours to do my blogging, planning my tweets and managing the business of writing.  Again, not ideal, but I find it easier to divide my attention between those tasks and parenting than I do when I try to be creative and parent at the same time.

I wouldn't have though the graphic would be such a motivator.  After all, I've always included my weekly word count in these posts and I hate when I have to report a 0 week.  But getting to enter information every day is proving to be a good counter to my bouts of mental inertia.  I think I'd have to be careful about it, since I'm already finding that the projected "here's where you need to be" total is a dragging discouragement.  But it would be great to have a similar graphic on my own site that I could see on a regular basis.

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